This article investigates the creation and workings of the Disarmament Section of the League of Nations Secretariat. It shows that the Disarmament Section was an outlier of the Secretariat: supressed by the Great Powers, it had less autonomy than other parts of the administration, which from an early stage limited its bureaucratic practice to the production of information. This bureaucratic production created unreliable factual foundations for negotiations and unrealistic public expectations. Thus, the article argues that the troubled birth and administrative strangling of the Disarmament Section of the Secretariat should play a significant role in our understanding of the broader collapse of general disarmament. By making this argument, the article breaks new ground by introducing failure as an analytical category to understand the role and practices of international public administrations.

From horse dung to garlic, olfactory debates raged in interwar Poland. Smells are ubiquitous and substantially influence how we perceive the atmosphere of a given place. This article focuses on ‘smell affairs’ and olfactory sensibilities that were emerging in the city of Lublin in Poland after 1918. In particular, it addresses what Lublin's courtyard smells tell us about the condition, development and mindset of a Polish city at that time. On their way into the ‘modern’ era, Lublin's citizens began to complain about rural elements interfering with the ‘metropolitan’ character of Lublin as well as how ‘ethnic smells’ of fellow Jewish citizens would intrude upon the air of ‘their’ ‘Polish’ city. Poking one's nose into the air and the ‘smellscapes’ of the urban courtyard, one can observe what was regarded as a part, or not, of a modern city in independent Poland.

This article compares the party apparatuses of the National Socialist Movement of the Netherlands and the National Socialist Workers’ Party of Sweden. These two parties, founded in the 1930s, both to some extent mimicked the organisational model of Hitler's party in Germany. While this has been frequently noted, the deployment of this model in practice has not been analysed in any detail. The article explores the specific characters of the Swedish and Dutch fascist party organisations diachronically vis-à-vis propaganda, member activism and internal cohesion, highlighting their changes, successes and failures. The comparison reveals that the party apparatus was highly dependent on the specifics of national infrastructure, demographic distribution and urbanisation and the physical landscape, with notable consequences for internal party cohesion and morale. In the final analysis the relative appeal and popularity of the parties is shown party be the result of how the Nazi organisational model was deployed in practice within each national context.

In 1936 Mussolini's fascist regime embarked upon an ambitious plan to hold the 1942 World's Fair in a newly built city south of Rome. At the peak of construction in 1939–40 an army of 5,000 workers laboured to complete the city in ‘record time’. The labour utilised to build the new city became a critical public spectacle in the final years of fascist rule, highlighted in films, covered by the press and featured on the itineraries of Rome's most important visitors. This activity was guided not just by the construction of buildings but also the purported fabrication of a distinct Italian fascist worker subjectivity. With the aim of fashioning pliant workers lacking in proverbial ‘class consciousness’, fascist thinkers publicly exhibited Italian workers as fixed within a ‘natural’ hierarchy of ancient Roman origin. In these renderings of the ‘new’ worker, class antagonisms in the modern division of labour were replaced with illustrations of exemplary sacrifice to familial and interpersonal authority with the function of subsuming ‘class interests’ to both employers and the state. In spite of these narratives, fascist aims regularly encountered limits when confronted by real workers, as yielded by an examination of responses to the regime's mandates within the built environment. Although workers never fully embodied this new ‘interiority’, the regime was successful in grounding cultural norms in a constrained field of practice, generating a framework for the domination of labour.

This article contributes to the debate about the history of the political economy of the European Economic Community (EEC). It retraces the efforts during the early years of the EEC to implement a form of ‘European economic programming’, that is, a more ‘dirigiste’ type of economic governance than is usually associated with European integration. Based on a variety of archives, it offers a new account of the making and failure of this project. It argues that, at the time, the idea of economic programming found many supporters, but its implementation largely failed for political as well as practical reasons. In so doing, it also brings to light the role of economists during the early years of European integration.

Under the Salazar regime, many Portuguese citizens spontaneously interacted with the secret police (PIDE), sending it letters of denunciation, prospective applications and petitions. The historians of the Estado Novo, by reducing the nature of the relations between the PIDE and society to its mechanisms of top-down repression, have overlooked the significance of the phenomenon. Drawing on the inputs of the international bibliography on accusatory practices and ‘everyday life’ under dictatorship, this article looks at the PIDE through the subjective perspectives of the individual citizens who approached it ‘from below’, thereby nuancing and complementing the established narrative of violence and repression. It focuses on the instrumentalisation of the PIDE by ordinary citizens as: an influential sponsor; an appropriable device of coercion; an instrument of private conflict resolution; a platform for collaborative interaction with the regime; an economic opportunity. The article also puts forward an interpretation of these ‘everyday’ interactions as part of a broader system of governance used by the authorities of the New State.

This article analyses the relationship of mutual benefit that formed between West Berlin's local government and experimental artists in the 1980s. In 1978 the West Berlin parliament established a grant programme to support independent artists operating in what was referred to as the ‘free scene’. The grants were intended to support the goal of restoring the city's status as a capital of artistic innovation. Soon after, the local tourism office also featured these independent artists within a new place marketing strategy focused on raising the ‘experiential value’ of the city's cultural offerings. But as this article shows, experimental artists were also using city grants to pursue alternative agendas focused on engaging with local populations in urban space. Through these projects, experimental artists extended the spirit of participatory democracy flourishing within the city's counter-cultural enclaves to broader areas of the city.

In his 1992 article, ‘Today, Freedom is Unfettered in Hungary,’ Columbia University history professor István Deák argued that after 1989 Hungarian historical research enjoyed ‘unfettered freedom. Deák gleefully listed the growing English literature on Hungarian history and hailed the ‘step-by step dismantling of the Marxist-Leninist edifice in historiography’ that he associated with the Institute of History at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS) under the leadership of György Ránki (1930–88). In this article he argued that the dismantling of communist historiography had started well before 1989. Besides celebrating the establishment of the popular science-oriented historical journal, History (História) (founded in 1979) and new institutions such as the Európa Intézet – Europa Institute (founded in 1990) or the Central European University (CEU) (founded in 1991) as turning points in Hungarian historical research, Deák listed the emergence of the question of minorities and Transylvania; anti-Semitism and the Holocaust; as well as the 1956 revolution. It is very true that these topics were addressed by prominent members of the Hungarian democratic opposition who were publishing in samizdat publications: among them János M. Rainer, the director of the 1956 Institute after 1989, who wrote about 1956. This list of research topics implies that other topics than these listed before had been free to research and were not at all political. This logic interiorised and duplicated the logic of communist science policy and refused to acknowledge other ideological interventions, including his own, while also insisting on the ‘objectivity’ of science. Lastly, Deák concluded that ‘there exists a small possibility that the past may be rewritten again, in an ultra-conservative and xenophobic vein. This is, however, only a speculation.’ Twenty years later Ignác Romsics, the doyen of Hungarian historiography, re-stated Deák's claim, arguing that there are no more ideological barriers for historical research. However, in his 2011 article Romsics strictly separated professional historical research as such from ‘dilettantish or propaganda-oriented interpretations of the past, which leave aside professional criteria and feed susceptible readers – and there are always many – with fraudulent and self-deceiving myths’. He thereby hinted at a new threat to the historical profession posed by new and ideologically driven forces. The question of where these ‘dilettantish or propaganda-oriented’ historians are coming from has not been asked as it would pose a painful question about personal and institutional continuity. Those historians who have become the poster boys of the illiberal memory politics had not only been members of the communist party, they also received all necessary professional titles and degrees within the professional community of historians.

Writing and researching Southern Europe as a symbiotic area has always presented a challenging task. Historians and political scientists such as Stanley Payne, Edward Malefakis, Giulio Sapelli, and Roberto Aliboni have studied the concept of Southern Europe and its difficult paths to modernity. They have been joined by sociologists and anthropologists who have debated the existence of a Southern European paradigm in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the arduous transformation of the region's welfare systems, economic development, education and family structures. These scholarly attempts to understand the specificities of Southern Europe date back to the concerns of Western European Cold War strategists in the 1970s, many of whom were worried about the status quo of the region in the aftermath of the fall of the dictatorships. But this geographical and geopolitical definition of the area did not necessarily follow existing cultural, political and economic patterns. Once the Eurozone crisis hit in the 2000s these questions came back with renewed force but with even less conceptual clarity, as journalists and pundits frequently gestured towards vague notions of what they considered to be ‘Southern Europe’.

In the era of the Schengen Area (at least in the days before Covid-19), travel from Munich to Bozen/Bolzano or Ljubljana to Trst/Trieste is a decidedly unremarkable, albeit beautiful, adventure. Just as meaningful as the lack of border controls, travellers find all public signage in both Italian and German (and sometimes Ladin, too) upon arrival in Bozen/Bolzano. Signs in the streets of Trst/Trieste less reliably have Slovene alongside the Italian, but assistance with translation can be found with little difficulty. The Italian autonomous regions ‘with special statutes’ in which these cities reside – Trentino-Alto Adige (South Tyrol) and Friuli Venezia Giulia (the Julian March) – are multilingual territories that, at least on an official level, embrace a multiethnic heritage and reality. In fact, Trentino-Alto Adige's consociational democracy is widely regarded among political scientists as an international role model for how states can successfully protect and give voice to minority populations. Those unfamiliar with the more recent history of these regions might be surprised to learn of these avowedly multiethnic political and cultural structures. For much of the first half of the twentieth century, the regions’ two states – Austria-Hungary until 1919 and thereafter Italy – employed the ‘nationality principle’ to define policies and populations in these territories. As in most of Europe at the time, sovereignty was increasingly predicated on the contemporary ideal of the nation state, in which borders, ethnicity, language and citizenship were all bound together. Of course, as a multiethnic empire, Austria-Hungary was much more concerned about centralising state authority (and then fighting a world war) than national homogeneity, while Italy's nationalisation campaign in the interwar period became fundamental to its presence in the new provinces. Still, both states sought to classify and ultimately to control their border populations by privileging ethnolinguistic categories of citizenship.